I’m planning to purchase a new burner strictly for burning non blue ray. My question is, are the blue ray burners built with better quality components throughout for reading/writing or, just cost more for the blue ray capability? I’ve been looking at a couple SamSung burners I think are the same burners inside just one is OEM and the other is not just more expensive. Thanks! Other brand suggestions are welcome.

All we have is anecdotal evidence saying that the Blu-ray drives tend to be slightly better built than the modern DVD burners. We haven’t seen that many complaints about dying Blu-ray drives, but this may simply be a reflection of their lesser popularity due to people moving away from optical formats, plus the 300% higher cost of the Blu-ray drives.

Part of the higher cost for Blu-ray drives is the blue laser reading/writing assembly, but licensing is also a pretty big factor.

Many of us recommend the Pioneer Blu-ray drives as being both dependable and high quality writers. Those who really want to split hairs recommend the Pioneer drives built for the Japanese market, like the BDR-209J. If you are in the US, I’m not sure how you’d find a J model however. The regular 209 is easily found at Amazon or Newegg.

IMHO,If you’re only gonna use it for dvd burning,buying a blu-ray burner is wasted money…
Even if the build quality COULD be better…
You can buy 4-5 dvd burners for the price of 1 blu-ray burner…so even if you’d buy a crappy 1,I’m pretty sure 4-5 burners in a row outlive the life expectation of 1 blu-ray burner,economically speaking…
I still burn most of my dvd’s with burners from around 2004-2007…

My SamSung burners have been OK .
I still use a BenQ 1650 for most of my burns.
All are IDE drives.
If I was looking for a newer SATA drive I would probably get a SamSung.
That’s only my opinion though.
I still also use a Matshita Hammer for an external but mostly I rip with it as it can’t be book typed. It can’t do scans either. It seems to be a very good reader though.